Transcription
Today, I'm just going to lay it all out on the table and tell you every single thing that you need to do to get a good week of strength and conditioning. It's going to cover every single athletic quality and set you up to reach your highest level of performance in whatever sport you're playing and also probably extend your playing career by about a decade as well.
This video is just another continuation of our series of demonstrating to people how simple world-class strength and conditioning can be if you actually understand it because this is probably the issue and this is why you're so confused because strength and conditioning coaches, they don't have good job security. So, what they unfortunately do a lot of the time is make things out to be more complicated than they need to be to justify their existence. You as the athlete understanding exactly how simple world-class strength and conditioning can be is exactly what 90% of strength and conditioning coaches are afraid of cuz you can do this for yourself.
And now, if you like the way that I talk about training, you can hire me to do it for you. I have coaching slots available and if you're interested in that, you can check out the form down below. Also, if you're a coach and you want to better understand and implement these concepts with your clients, check out GPP level one down below. That's for the coaches.
Now, let's break down exactly what you need to do to get a good strength and conditioning program going that covers all your bases within that 7-day cycle. So, you can just literally run this same week of training again and again and again and it's everything you need for your long-term athletic development.
If we're going to have a comprehensive week of strength and conditioning, first thing we need to do is get really clear on what the primary physical athletic qualities actually are. And I'll be honest, we're grouping a few of those together because for practical purposes, they are more similar than different and first cab off the rank is a great example of that. It's strength and hypertrophy. To us as athletes, they're the same thing. If you're a competitive powerlifter or a competitive bodybuilder, I'll accept an argument that there's something different, but functionally for athletes, they are identical. And I'll say that you want to look at it more as bodybuilding than powerlifting.
So, traditionally when we're making recommendations for strength training for athletes, it was very, you know, there's a lot of functional flavor there. It's like, you You can't use machines. Can't use machines. They're not going to develop your stabilizer muscles or functional real world strength, whatever the hell that means. We used to think that the best way to grow muscle was to chase the pump, do a lot of high reps, a lot of high volume, just chase fatigue. Conveniently for us, it turns out that the best way to get stronger, especially if you're not on performance enhancing drugs, is to just try to get as strong as possible at all these individual muscle actions. And so, you can do them as compound movements or isolations. It really just comes down to how efficient you want to be in terms of just getting through the whole system or how targeted you want to be if you have some weak spots that are need a little bit more isolation work. But, long gone are the days where every single athlete needed to understand how to barbell squat or how to barbell bench press or use any sort of free weights for that matter. If you have access to a good commercial gym with a whole range of decent enough machines, you are absolutely sorted for your strength training.
The split that we're going to go for is full body every other day. So, at least three sessions a week doing full body, exact same exercises. We want one to two hard sets within zero to one reps of failure. If you're a little bit more advanced, you can add an extra rep in reserve there.
And now, this training, if done well, is also going to tick off one of our other major primary physical qualities. And that one is flexibility. Unfortunately, this is going to be another one of those little semantics discussions, but they are important to have because we need to be clear about our terms so we can understand each other. There's so much internal conflict within the fitness community about using terms mobility versus flexibility. A lot of A lot of people like to pretend that, you know, flexibility is maybe these passive ranges, mobility is your active ranges, but mobility is sort of just this word that people added into the conversation when we already had a word to describe what we wanted, flexibility. Like, just being able to move your body through different ranges of motion. Mobility to me is like walking around. Like, you could almost call that like speed training. Like, in a Traditionally, when we talk about how mobile someone is, it's Yeah, it's like their ability to like ambulate and change their location. It's It's not quite as bad as functional training, but it's not a great descriptor, especially because I feel like flexibility, you people really know what you mean. Mobility is one of those ones where it's like, "Oh, you've been a little bit sneaky there. You've been a little bit of an S&C coach, you know?" Scared of your job, got to make it complicated. I just say, you know, flexibility. Doing the splits, getting your arms up above your head.
Bodybuilding style strength training used to have a really bad reputation for ruining people's flexibility. Uh turns out it's actually awesome for flexibility. A lot of people are so high now on strength training for improving flexibility. They'll say things now like it's even better than standard static stretching for improving your flexibility. I don't know if I believe that cuz I'm yet to see anyone like hip adductor machine their way into the front splits or anything. But the simple truth is, whatever range of motion that you train through, you will maintain. And you can also over time gradually increase ranges of motion with well-programmed resistance training as well. So, you just have to make the effort to go through that range of motion even when the weights are getting tricky, and you'll be as flexible as you want to be just with bodybuilding training.
Man, we're already off to such a ripping start just by doing full body machine-based strength training 3 days a week. We've crossed off all our strength and hypertrophy. We've crossed off all our flexibility needs. Next thing we want to think about is speed. A lot of S&C coaches would overcomplicate this by being like, "Well, no, we have to train power as well." But power is just strength plus speed. So, if you have a lot of strength and you have a lot of speed, guess what? You're a powerful person. And for this, we're going to employ our signature GPP plyo warm-up. So, all that is is about three to four sets of a two-legged or leaping plyometric variation. And then anywhere between typically four to six sets of a single-legged plyometric activity that's often a little bit more intense. I absolutely love the plyo warm-up because I typically start my resistance training with lower body first. So, I feel like we almost get this potentiation or we definitely get a really solid warm-up by doing our plyos and then going into our lower body strength training. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about the GPP plyo warm up, I've got a free program for it down below in the free program section, and there's also a full longer video I've done on it, which is hopefully in the sidebar of your YouTube page right now. Hopefully we can manifest that for you.
And honestly, as far as the stuff you want to do in the gym, that is absolutely everything you need for a great week of strength and conditioning for an athlete, but we're still missing two major physical qualities that we need to train. And honestly, you can make the argument that these are actually our two most important qualities if you want to be a weapon of an athlete. Maybe it's Maybe it's three, but I'm just going to riff on this. You actually have to go and play a sport. I wish this didn't need to be said in this day and age, but unfortunately it does. A lot of people they're doing their strength and conditioning, they're training like an athlete, and then they damn near they man, you know, I've been doing my S&C for a whole year and I just don't feel that athletic. I'm like, "Well, what sport are you playing?" They're like, "I'm not playing a sport." I'm like, "Well, that's why you don't feel like an athlete." Not that there's anything wrong with training like an athlete if you don't have time to play sport. A lot of people just like super busy, but if you have the time and the ability to play sport, it's the most important part of training like an athlete. Not only does playing sports or all different kinds of sports just bring up your general levels of athleticism, but it provides us with phenomenal opportunities to increase our conditioning for sport and our levels of endurance. There is no better form of cardio than playing a pickup game of football or basketball or soccer or whatever it is with you mates. Just small-sided games. There's just something about it when you're chasing after a ball in the park like a dog, you honestly forget how hard you're training cuz you're so distracted, and you just develop this phenomenal gas tank just from playing the actual sports. If you need more endurance, you just pick up another sport on the side, and then all of a sudden you just got this insane gas tank, but you're also developing all these insane I used to call them like micro-athletic qualities along the way.
There is one more major physical quality that we still haven't ticked off, but we're going to sneak in right before we play these games. And that is microdosing our speed training as a warm-up before we play our actual sport. So, depending if you've got sports practice or it's just before the match, for our warm-up we're going to get in a couple of shorter accelerations. And then after we warm up with some shorter accelerations or maybe even some skips, march, or just some other plyometric variations, we're going to get anywhere between one to two touches at our max velocity. So, depending on how quick you are, this is going to look anywhere from at least a 30 to 40 m sprint, potentially up to 70 or 80 m if you're quite a quick person and you need a long time to get up to your max velocity. And we're just going to look at doing this one to two times a week, fitting it in before your sports practice. We already do get a lot of great exposures typically to acceleration and getting around max velocity just from playing sport. But just adding in some pure acceleration where you don't have to worry about who's in front of you or what direction you're going or just hitting and hitting some genuine max velocity without thinking about where the defenders are or where your teammates are on the field. That is just higher quality work at the end of the day.
But there you have it. Truly world-class S&C. And how simple was that? We're just hitting machines three days a week, warming up with a couple of sets of pliers beforehand, get some speed work in before we go and play our sport. And that is genuinely world-class strength and conditioning where you haven't neglected a single meaningful physical quality. If you want to really impress me, maybe just throw some Olympic lifts on after that. But I can't even I can't sit here and look you in the eyes and tell you, "Hey, you you're missing out if you don't do Olympic lifts." Missing out on what? Like, yeah, you're missing out on Olympic lifts and I love them and they're so fun and and yeah, there are some little magic micro qualities that come along with any form of training. But as far as major major physical qualities that I can make maintain eye contact to be like, "This this makes a difference. This means something. This is important. You can't skip this." We've got all that. We've got all that. It's sorted.
All right, there's this strength and conditioning program. Don't let coaches Most coaches, like, you know, we use this term content creator often a bit of an insult. And honestly, a lot of the over complement a lot of the over complication of strength and conditioning athletic development, it is just people trying to be content creators at the end of the day. I don't begrudge it for it. I'm a content creator at the end of the day, but I mean, I guess I think I'm better than all you guys because I do keep it simple still. Um coaching slots available. Free programs down below. Uh if you're a coach, sign up for GPP level one. It's the best deal on the market. No one No one covers No one covers the concepts that we do here at GPP in the level of detail and depth that we do here at GPP for the price that we have here at GPP. So, it's the best deal on the market for upskilled strength and conditioning coaches. I'll see you with another video in another couple of days. See who we can piss off with another uh oversimplified take on athletic development, but I'll catch you guys then.